Lillian Boxfish Takes a Walk(15)
“Of course, Miss Boxfish, you’re right. I misspoke,” Artie said. “It’s not a tiny thing. But if you’ll permit me, I shall make our case.”
“Very well,” I said. “Fire away.”
“Our concern is that Oh, Do Not Ask for Promises does not speak to the full range of your poetic flowering. Your emotional gamut.”
“Maybe not,” I said. “But it’s catchy. It’s perfect. It evokes Dorothy Parker by way of Edna St. Vincent Millay. The title matches much of the sentiment.”
“Much,” said Artie, “but not all, Miss Boxfish. That’s the issue. You’re still in the bloom of youth—hardly a spinster, and hardly such a perpetual cynic as that title suggests. While the persona is amusing and effective for a poem’s length—just the thing for Vanity Fair—in assembling the book we’ve sought to hint at a more gentle, more vulnerable sensibility. A distruster of people, an eater of men: Is this really the narrow picture of yourself you wish to present to the world? You scoff at love now, but may yet change your mind.”
“Artie, darling,” I said, appealing to his status as a confirmed bachelor, one who perhaps shared with Housman more than just a pair of initials, “you may be more likely than I to marry someday.”
Artie gave me a wary look. Then he relaxed, his abashed expression sliding away, another of who knows how many masks. “Aren’t you curious to hear our alternate title?”
“Fine,” I said, trying not to sigh. “Why not?”
“Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon,” he said. “Isn’t that pretty? Fresh and wistful.”
“It’s too tritely poetic,” I said. “Too much of the sky. Not enough of the razor.”
“I take your point. But speaking as someone who knows you, Miss Boxfish, you are not so wicked as you seek to appear. You know a thing or two about cocktail-lounge love, but that hardly sums you up.”
Artie was right: I was not entirely like that. My poems were not entirely like that. Though I kept the effort off my face, my mind was racing to consider poems in the book that might supply a compromise title, one that could mollify the sales department without mortifying me. One of my favorites was inspired by a wish I once made on a lightning bug I’d seen, operating improbably in East Fiftieth Street: “What makes you seek your fortune here In Gotham? You must be as queer As I am, and a million other / Insects far from home and Mother.”
Still, a judicious capacity for wonder hardly invalidated my cynicism, which was no less sincere or profound. When it came to love—so-called—I considered myself particularly accomplished in the art of amputating body from heart. Love makes the world go round, Helen and I would often say, setting the other up to reply, Then it makes the world go flat.
“Of course there’s more to the book, Artie. But that title’s terrible. Boxfish is no moony girl sighing for her lunar love to find her on a silver-bathed balcony. Here, just look,” I said, reaching for the proofs. “Just turn to any page, any page whatsoever, and you’ll see what I mean.”
“But Frequent Wishing on the Gracious Moon also comes from one of your poems, Miss Boxfish, as I’m sure you recall,” said Artie, reaching across the desk to turn to that page, that poem, with startling accuracy. “So it too describes you. It’s a beautiful line, I daresay. Hopeful, and bright—and romantic, at least latently. All fine qualities that you personally share with your wonderful poems.”
In all my days I have rarely received praise with any sort of discomfort. Yet as this conversation drifted away from my manuscript and toward my character, I found myself reacting with an antipathy that was almost allergic. I did not want to talk about this. I particularly did not want to talk about this with Artie, whom I’d viewed as the gatekeeper to a world of letters free of treacly sentiment, a guide to a route around the tacky cobwebs that seemed fated to snare every promising or challenging thing and drag it back to some tedious norm. Hearing him advance an argument that I’d sooner expect from my mother was worse than disappointing; it was just shy of horrifying, catapulting me straight past self-doubt into crack-brained paranoia. Surely, he seemed to suggest, I couldn’t really mean what my poems said. Could any sane person really oppose hope, romance, love, marriage, children, family: the most basic materials of human society? Was I—the cool and composed sweetheart of the smart set, the Girl Poet made flesh—secretly a monster for entertaining such suspicions?
Polite intransigence seemed the best tactic. “Ah, inflation!” I said. “Personal inflation, that’s the thing! I am so much pleasanter and more competent when I am being flattered. But nevertheless I must insist, Artie, on the original title. With all due respect to your expertise, I do know a thing or two about how to entice a customer.”
“Are you sure, my dear, that you cannot be persuaded?”
“Artie, I’m sure. Please don’t tell me that this means we’ve reached an impasse. I’ve already begun to spend the royalties in my mind.”
“No, it’s not an impasse,” he said, leaning back in his wooden chair. “I told the boys in sales I’d give it a try and do my best. Now I have. I still wish you’d change it, but if it’s the original title you want, then the original title you shall keep. I suppose you do have a certain hard-won reputation to uphold. Your more-than-passable vamp impersonation. Even if I’m not entirely fooled.”